A little diversion from the process of citizenship recogniton to celebrate a family recipe, one that almost got away! These are not the cookies you often see called crustali, but something quite different. Perhaps Arberesh? I’m not sure. But here…
Category: Becoming Italian
Just about every document you submit for recognition of your Italian jure sanguinis citizenship must be an official document and must be authenticated in a way acceptable to Italy. So, no, you can’t drag that copy of your mother’s birth certificate…
I’ve stolen–or let’s say borrowed–the title of this post from a Dorothy Sayers novel. If you haven’t read Dorothey Sayers, lucky you! You have it all ahead of you. And even if mystery is not your thing, you will love…
Last time, I mentioned three conditions you needed to meet to qualify for Dual Italian citizenship. Incidentally, I can talk about this only from the perspective of an American citizen, because I don’t know how or if other countries’ laws…
If you’ve been following my escapades so far, it probably won’t surprise you to learn that my impressive record of failures in reconnecting with my ancestry only made me want to do it more. But I did realize I’d need…
The family was getting a little ragged around the edges after a full afternoon of clueless window-shopping for relatives. Now, we pulled up in front of a large three story house in San Demetrio Corone, and the owner came out…
With confidence in the full, beautiful day ahead of us, we hit the road at 9:30am. Of course, on the way to the place that was sort of on the way to our destination, we had to make a stop—it…
“We left at 9:30 this morning for THE TRIP to Macchia Albanese.” Those words are from my travel diary of 21 April, 1998. We hadn’t been back to Italy or any part of Europe in well over a decade, confining our…
After the sobering experience of coming so close to seeing what Macchia was like, I knew we needed to know more stuff: more about the area, more of the Italian language and more about my actual family. More about the…
With a couple of clicks of the mouse and a decent internet connection you can find nearly anyplace on earth. But that wasn’t true in the early 1980s. Trying to find Macchia Albanese—the town I had reason to believe was…